Salvatore Gravano was underboss of the Gambino crime family of New York when he became a federal witness in the autumn of 1991 and admitted his part in the murder of at least nineteen people. Born in Brooklyn in 1945, he stood beside its boss, John Gotti, from 1985. His testimony at Gotti's trial in Brooklyn in the winter of 1992 helped convict Gotti on every count of a racketeering indictment that included five murders, and his cooperation went on to contribute to some three dozen convictions of organized crime figures.
For his own crimes Gravano pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced in September 1994 to five years, with almost four already served. The judge called his cooperation "the bravest thing I have ever seen." The sentence drew criticism from defense lawyers and from the families of the dead. After his release he moved to Arizona, left the federal witness program in December 1997, and in February 2000 was arrested there with dozens of others in an inquiry into a large MDMA ring. He pleaded guilty in both federal and state courts and was sentenced in 2002 to twenty years federally and nineteen years in Arizona. He was released in September 2017 and remains on lifetime federal parole.
Gravano was born in Brooklyn in 1945. He left school early and served two years in the Army. His criminal career began with robbery, burglary and loan-sharking and later extended to murder and to crime connected with the construction industry. He became a member of the Gambino family, and served as a capo, then as consigliere, and finally as underboss to John Gotti from 1985 to 1991. In 1994 his income was put at about $250,000 a year from illegal activity, with more than $500,000 a year from a construction business.
In 1985 the Gambino family was large: about 23 active crews, some 300 made members and more than 2,000 associates. Its boss, Paul Castellano, led it until December of that year. Gotti took command after Castellano's death, and Gravano became his underboss and, for the next five years, his closest confidant.
Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti died in Manhattan on December 16, 1985. Aniello Dellacroce, the Gambino underboss, had died two weeks earlier, and within days of Castellano's death Gotti was the new boss of the family.
Gotti was later convicted of the murder of Castellano, and Gravano was the prosecution's principal witness to how it came about. He testified that Gotti arranged the killing. In recorded conversations played at the 1992 trial, Gotti said of Castellano in 1989 that he "felt he had to hit me first."
Gravano admitted that he took part in nineteen murders between 1970 and 1990, ten of them authorized by Gotti. At the 1994 sentencing the judge said that Gravano himself had carried out one of the nineteen and that in the others he had "aided and abetted or was a member of the conspiracy." Several of the dead were named at the trials that followed.
Liborio Milito was a longtime associate of Gravano and died in 1988. Louis DiBono was another associate. Gravano testified that DiBono was killed for failing to show Gotti proper respect and for not appearing when summoned, while defense counsel put to him that he had ordered the killing himself over a tax debt of tens of thousands of dollars. Thomas Spinelli was among the nineteen he admitted. Gotti and Frank Locascio were charged with the murders of Castellano, Bilotti, Robert DiBernardo, Milito and DiBono, and with conspiracy to murder a further man.
Each of these men left relatives, and the families of several of the dead later pressed claims against Gravano's earnings from his book.
The FBI had listened to Gotti's circle for years. Recording equipment placed in an apartment used by Gotti over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1989 captured him talking with Locascio, Gravano and others, and in them Gotti spoke harshly about Gravano, complaining of his growing control of construction companies and of the power it might give him. On December 11, 1990, the FBI arrested Gotti, Locascio and others at a social club in Little Italy in Manhattan, and Gravano was also arrested that month. A superseding indictment returned in the Eastern District of New York on July 18, 1991 charged Gravano as Gotti's consigliere.
After months of pretrial proceedings Gravano learned from the recordings how Gotti had spoken of him, and he knew that a conviction would mean life in custody. In the autumn of 1991 he dismissed his lawyer and agreed to cooperate. The agreement capped his sentence at twenty years, in place of the mandatory life without parole he otherwise faced, and he pleaded guilty to a superseding racketeering charge. The agreement was struck weeks before the Gotti trial.
Gotti had been prosecuted before and had not been convicted. On March 13, 1987 he and co-defendants were acquitted of all charges in a racketeering and murder case, and on February 9, 1990 he was acquitted of assault and conspiracy charges. The December 1990 arrest was therefore the government's fourth attempt, and prosecutors needed evidence from inside the family. The recordings from 1989 supplied part of it. Gravano, whom Gotti had criticized on those tapes, supplied the rest.
Gotti and Locascio went on trial before Judge I. Leo Glasser in Brooklyn on January 21, 1992. The indictment contained racketeering, murder, conspiracy to murder, illegal gambling, loan-sharking, tax and obstruction counts. Gravano testified for nine days. He described the ceremony by which members were inducted, and he estimated Gotti's annual income from the family at about $1.2 million.
Defense counsel Albert Krieger cross-examined him on March 6, 1992 about the deaths of DiBono and Milito. The defense argued that Gravano had acted for his own ends, citing a tax debt owed by DiBono and Gravano's later control of a company that Milito had owned. A recording made about ten months before DiBono's death had Gotti telling Locascio that DiBono "refused to come in when I called." The defense called him a rat who would implicate others to win a lighter sentence. He acknowledged that he hoped for leniency. His account did not change.
The jury deliberated for about thirteen hours and on April 2, 1992 found Gotti guilty on all thirteen counts. The counts included murder, conspiracy to murder, racketeering, loan-sharking, illegal gambling and obstruction of justice. The jury was anonymous and sequestered. Locascio was convicted on all counts except one gambling count. On June 23, 1992 Judge Glasser sentenced each man to life imprisonment, and Gotti was also fined $250,000. The Supreme Court rejected Gotti's appeal on May 2, 1994. An FBI official said after the verdict that "every charge stuck." Gotti died in federal custody on June 10, 2002.
Gravano's cooperation did not end with Gotti. By May 1994 prosecutors credited his testimony with fourteen convictions, five of them guilty pleas that April, plus one acquittal and one hung jury. Those convicted with his help included Victor Orena, Thomas Gambino, James Failla and Robert Bisaccia. Two Gambino captains pleaded guilty to seven-year terms in April 1994 rather than face him. He still had to testify at the trial of Vincent Gigante, the reputed boss of the Genovese family, in 1997.
He appeared as the first witness to describe Gigante's position at the head of the Genovese family, and in Brooklyn federal court he said under oath that "Chin was the boss." Defense counsel used his book, Underboss, written with Peter Maas, in cross-examination, and Gravano answered, "This is not a book. This is a trial. I'm under oath." The trial before Judge Jack Weinstein ran from June 25 to July 25, 1997. Gigante was convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to murder and sentenced on December 18, 1997 to twelve years and a fine of $1.25 million. The Second Circuit affirmed in January 1999 and the Supreme Court let the conviction stand in January 2000.
In late September 1994 Judge Glasser sentenced Gravano in the federal court in Brooklyn to five years, although the agreement allowed up to twenty. The judge counted the almost four years Gravano had already spent in custody and said that his cooperation was "the bravest thing I have ever seen." The prosecutor, John Gleeson, said that the information had led to 37 convictions or guilty pleas, and that Gravano had testified in seven trials and would have testified in at least six more.
Defense lawyers argued that so light a sentence for nineteen admitted murders might encourage other defendants to invent stories to earn leniency. Gerald Lefcourt, a New York defense lawyer, had said the same about the agreement months before the sentence. Relatives of the dead criticized the result. He was released in 1995, about a year early. He entered the witness protection program, lived in Colorado for a time, and in 1995 moved to Arizona.
Underboss, published in 1997 with Peter Maas, earned Gravano $250,000, a sum he acknowledged under oath at the Gigante trial, and the families of some of the dead sued to claim any profits. New York's "Son of Sam" law was invoked against the book. On March 8, 2000 the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court held unanimously that the law did not apply to the federal offenses the book described and that the state's crime victims board lacked standing, since no victim had filed a complaint with it. The ruling let him keep the proceeds.
Arizona took a different course. Under that state's restitution law, the Attorney General's office later seized royalties from the book, and by 2012 had helped relatives of victims recover about $420,000. A relative of Edward Garofalo, who died in 1990, was among those who received a share.
On Thursday, February 24, 2000, Phoenix police arrested Gravano in the Phoenix area, where he had been living in Tempe. Dozens of others were arrested in dawn operations the same day, and the Arizona Attorney General's office, then led by Janet Napolitano, prosecuted the case. Police said that the ring had sold more than 20,000 MDMA tablets a week. Investigators described Gravano as its financier and as a mentor to its leader, Michael Papa. The investigation was led by the Phoenix Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, with help from the Gilbert Police Department and the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Gravano was held on $5 million bail. His lawyer, Larry Hammond, argued that police had no direct proof of his involvement and relied on hearsay from recorded conversations.
Gravano pleaded guilty to federal drug conspiracy charges in the Eastern District of New York on May 25, 2001. In the Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona he pleaded guilty in June 2001 to ten counts, before Judge Steven Sheldon. The counts included conspiracy to sell dangerous drugs, participating in a criminal syndicate, conducting an illegal enterprise, offering to sell or transport dangerous drugs, money laundering and use of wire or electronic communications in a drug-related transaction. Federal sentencing, first set for September 11, 2001, was postponed after the attacks of that day, and the Arizona sentence had to wait for the federal one.
In September 2002 Judge Allyne R. Ross sentenced Gravano in the federal court in Brooklyn to twenty years, the statutory maximum. The sentencing guidelines recommended no more than fifteen and a half years, and Ross departed upward, saying that he had shown no remorse. He did not speak at the hearing and showed no reaction. The federal conviction was for conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute MDMA, under 21 U.S.C. sections 846, 841(a)(1) and 841(b)(1)(C), and the sentence included lifetime supervised release and a fine of $100,000.
On October 30, 2002 Judge Sheldon sentenced him in Maricopa County to nineteen years. Gravano told the judge, "You've been very fair with me and my family and I want to thank you very much." His lawyer said the sentence was what had been expected and that Gravano had been punished more harshly than others in the case because his name had become involved. Napolitano called the case "one of the largest and most successful drug prosecutions in our history." Attorney General Napolitano said that his admission showed he was "just another lifelong criminal." Papa had testified against Gravano in March 2002. The state later obtained monetary judgments: $933,750 on June 2, 2003, representing income the enterprise had taken out of the legitimate economy, and $805,713.41 on November 5, 2003 for investigative and court costs and attorney fees. Total judgments obtained by the state exceeded $2 million, including royalties from Underboss.
In 2015, when he was seventy, Gravano asked Judge Ross to cut nearly three years from the sentence under a retroactive reduction of drug penalties that could have trimmed up to 34 months. Ross refused, citing "a complete absence of rehabilitation and an utter lack of remorse" and a continuing danger to the public.
Arizona corrections officials said that Gravano had served seventeen years of the twenty when he left custody in the week of September 18, 2017, with an expected release date in March 2019. He was released into lifetime federal parole, with Arizona supervision through at least March 2019, and his attorney described him as a model inmate. He was seventy-two. He was living in the Phoenix area in October 2025.
Gotti, Locascio and Gravano were charged under the federal racketeering statute, 18 U.S.C. section 1962, with substantive and conspiracy counts under subsections (c) and (d). Murder could therefore be charged as conduct of the enterprise, which is the setting in which Gravano's plea to a superseding racketeering charge carried his admission of nineteen murders.
A cooperation agreement of this kind trades a lighter sentence for testimony. Without it Gravano faced mandatory life without parole; with it the ceiling was twenty years, and the judge chose five.
The money cases ran on two different laws. New York's "Son of Sam" law, which Gravano's book brought before the New York courts, was held not to reach federal offenses. Arizona's restitution law allowed the state to take royalties from the same book and to obtain judgments against the drug enterprise for the income it had taken from the legitimate economy.
The nineteen deaths rest on Gravano's own admissions and on his plea agreement, not on a trial of him for each. The judge at sentencing said that he personally carried out one and was a member of the conspiracy in the rest.
The reliability of Gravano as a witness was contested at every trial. The defense argued that he shaped his account to win a lighter sentence, that he acted for his own gain in the deaths of DiBono and Milito, and, at the Gigante trial, that his book undercut his testimony. Juries convicted Gotti, Locascio and Gigante after hearing him.
1945: Gravano is born in Brooklyn, New York.
1970 to 1990: the period of the killings he later admitted.
December 16, 1985: Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti die in Manhattan; Gotti becomes boss of the Gambino family and Gravano underboss.
November 1989: recorders placed in an apartment used by Gotti capture him talking with Gravano and Locascio.
December 11, 1990: Gotti, Locascio and others are arrested in Manhattan; Gravano is also taken into custody.
July 18, 1991: superseding racketeering indictment, Eastern District of New York.
Autumn 1991: Gravano agrees to cooperate and pleads guilty to a superseding racketeering charge.
January 21 to April 2, 1992: Gotti and Locascio are tried in Brooklyn; Gotti is convicted on all thirteen counts on April 2.
June 23, 1992: Gotti and Locascio are sentenced to life.
Late September 1994: Gravano is sentenced to five years by Judge Glasser.
1995: he is released and moves to Arizona.
July 25, 1997: Gigante is convicted after Gravano's testimony.
December 1997: Gravano leaves the witness protection program.
February 24, 2000: Gravano is arrested in the Phoenix area.
March 8, 2000: the New York Appellate Division rules that he may keep the proceeds of his book.
May 25, 2001: federal guilty plea in Brooklyn; June 2001: Arizona pleas to ten counts.
September 2002: twenty-year federal sentence (Judge Ross).
October 30, 2002: nineteen-year Arizona sentence (Judge Sheldon).
2015: Judge Ross denies a request to reduce the sentence.
September 2017: Gravano is released; lifetime federal parole begins.
October 23, 2025: he is living in the Phoenix area.